ABSTRACT

Building on the literature on statelessness and on refugees, this chapter brings to the fore discussions anchored on conventions drafted at the end of World War II into contemporary reality of global protracted conflicts. We put forth theoretical and policy proposals that reflect the urgent humanitarian imperative to reconceptualize our understanding of displaced peoples and of our treatment of refugees and the stateless, whose relationship to the nation-state model is represented by exclusion, persecution and precarity. We suggest that immigration policies and humanitarian interventions from more prosperous regions of the globe should reflect the new landscape of the stateless, which includes both those who have no nation to call their own, but also those whose nation-state of birth is in protracted disarray, with the nation-state merely existing in name. The latter, we argue, hold a nationality that is at best nominal as these war-torn countries guarantee none of the rights that we associate with nationality or citizenship. We hope this chapter opens up more dialogue into the highly stringent legal barriers refugees and the stateless confront in their search for asylum to access civil, social and political rights, the basic dignity denied them in their places of birth.